Candidates for a unified theory justifying copyright in all its manifestations include the value of the copyright owner’s efforts in creating the work. This value can take a natural rights form – the value of genius – but it can also take the more mundane Lockean agricultural form – copyright owners are the sowers of their intellectual labor.

Embedding copyright info into each photo may sound like a daunting proposition, but digiKam provides a nifty template feature which lets you create copyright templates and apply them to multiple photos in one go.

Ottawa copyright circles are buzzing with hints that the government is preparing its new revised copyright bill, and will be tabling it soon, perhaps as early as next week. And the buzz is that the new law will basically be a copy of the controversial U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Copyright law is "interesting" to say the least — and incredibly contentious. For some, it is an evil that stifles progress. For others, it is all that stands between them and bankruptcy. As with anything, the nature of copyright is not black and white — there are not just shades of gray, but a whole rainbow of copyright colors.

The draft Gallo report on "Enforcement of intellectual property rights in the internal market" contains the entertainment industry's wishlist for the future of copyright policy: extra-judicial sanctions turning internet service providers into a private copyright police.

A draft ISP Copyright Code of Practice, aimed at clarifying sanctions against illicit downloaders of copyright works, has been released for public comment — and internet industry sources are already critical of the effort.

RMS: « Disney bought a US law to extend the copyright on the drawing of Mickey Mouse, but it may have lost that copyright in 1929 through an error.

The Jaunty Jackalope release celebration continues. App Runner adds items to the Gnome context menu to launch executables or scripts directly from the GUI—even letting you easily run as root.

Ben Cato Clough and Luke Upchurch's "When Copyright Goes Bad" (from Consumers International) is a great, 15-minute mini-documentary on what copyright can do, what it is doing, and what it needs to stop doing.